Menu

Random Thoughts From An Unusual Company

Hello IBM Support – How Can I Confuse You?

It’s been a busy week of opening PMRs across various products and customers. The IBM PMR system has nuggets of hilarity in it if you just decide to go with the flow….This morning I needed to open a PMR for a customer in the US. My problem is that under my IBM registration I am listed as the admin or authority for several different customer numbers* but can only open a PMR for two of them. No idea why just those two. I also have , several times, opened a call and only had “Save As Draft” instead of submit as an option – hilariously if you “Save As Draft” you never see it again. You only have to learn that lesson two or three times….

Finding the right number to call (because I have to call the right IBM centre for the region each customer is in) I placed the call , since it was out of hours , let’s just say I didn’t get their “A” team.

Problem No.1 the guy I spoke to had not heard of IBM Connections Content Manager and could not find it on their system to log a call against

Problem No.2 he did not understand my summary sentence of the problem although he told me he had written it down, when I went to look online the PMR had no assigned product, title or description.

My favourite bit though was this conversation

Support: So shall I open this as Severity 1
Me: Well no, it’s not a system down , it’s loss of feature so that Sev 2
Support: If I don’t open it as Severity 1 no-one will contact you for at least 24 hrs. Do you not want to be contacted today?
Me: Well yes I do want to be contacted today but it’s not a Severity 1
Support: I will go ahead and open it as Severity 1 so you are contacted today
Me: But my system isn’t down – that means system down
Support: I will uncheck the “System Down” box
Me: {confused} OK.

I then went in online updated it and changed it to Sev 2. Oh and I was contacted by support already.

*yes I know I can ask a customer to approve me as a BP but most customers know the process for adding me to their accounts like they do other internal users and so that’s what the majority have done. I choose not to ask them to jump through IBM hoops just to make my life easier.